The Rise of Prefabrication in Construction

BRITTON LANGDON: Good morning, everybody.

AUDIENCE: Good morning.

BRITTON LANGDON: Happy Thursday-- I don't know what's doing that for-- and fourth day of AU. Everybody's bright, and fresh, and ready to go. David already fell asleep twice. I haven't even started yet. My name is Britton Langdon, if this thing's going to work. Come on. Or I'll just do this. Perfect. Britton Langdon, that's me.

I was CEO and founder of MSUITE when we started this submission for this presentation back in, gosh, March. But now I'm the vice president of construction technology for Stanley Black & Decker/DeWalt. MSUITE was acquired by DeWalt in May of this year to be the beachhead of a new construction technology initiative at the company. So we're rolling hardware, software, tools together into a platform that helps mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire protection, and structural contractors.

So first thing I want to do is-- how many people in here actually are a part of an organization that fabricates? Well, there you go. And how many mechanical contractors in here? Few. Electrical? All right. Structural? There we go, very cool, all right.

So I've been in the business for a good amount of time, a couple of decades now, unfortunately. And I was one of the founding members of what is now called the MEP Innovation Technology Committee, but back in the day it was the MCA Tech Committee.

We had the idea, as mechanical contractors in the industry, that we should start talking about technology and how it might help us as organizations. I came from a mechanical contractor called Modern Companies. I was the head of the VC side and the fab shop.

I was actually talking to a couple of you folks here in the booth over the last few days. It was my job back in 2013 to manage our design side and our fab side and make sure they play nicely together. And then once we got that, it was that the field could be brought in to actually help us get better at prefabrication, and design, and all of the streams that go between BIM, fab, and field.

And today we're going to talk a little bit about prefabrication. Some of you, this is going to be-- it's going to start very 101. It's going to be-- yeah, I know, it's-- fall asleep but then wake-up shortly thereafter. When we talk about the construction ecosystem today and as it's moving forward, we're going to talk a little bit about prefab technology and how it's being adopted and how it's growing in the construction industry.

And we'll take a little step back and say, OK, where to start. And this can be for people that are just starting prefab or it can be for people that are actually taking that next step to a more complicated journey.

So a little bit about me. Like I said, I started at that mechanical contractor in that picture right there when we created MSUITE, which some of you might remember us as FabPro One. Yeah, that's one of those domain things you choose on GoDaddy. It worked out for a little while and then we rebranded. So FabPro One turned into MSUITE in 2019. But before that we were established at Modern.

So we created a software that would help us manage our fabrication processes. At the time we started selling fabrication around North America and our shop management team was just inundated with emails, and phone calls, and everything else about where's my stuff, how long is it going to take to get to me, where are our materials, and vice versa. We were constantly reaching out to our distributors and other partners asking the same questions.

So we built a cloud-based system in 2013, 2014, early 2015 for us. And then I spoke at a conference in 2015 and found out everybody had the same issues we do and we got asked to sell the software to people. We partnered with a reseller back then called TSI. Some of you guys might remember those guys. It didn't last long, but it taught us a lot about the industry, a lot about what people needed, and what they didn't need.

And we had about six beta customers back in 2016. They taught us that what we wrote at Modern would not work for anybody else and we rewrote it twice in about four years' time. So 2019 we went commercially pretty wide and at that point it was stable. It was capable of being used by MEP contractors, but dry wallers, wall paneling builders, things like that-- and we really started to spread our wings.

In 2020, we realized that we had a product that could really go and we went out and raised money. So at that time, we ended up raising money, as you see there, from Stanley Ventures. Stanley Ventures is DeWalt's venture capital arm.

And we started to work a little bit more closely with them. We developed the Handworks Pro product-- redeveloped it and off we went. Well, in 2022, we were about to go-- earlier this year we were about to go raise a much larger round, and we were in a board meeting, and one of our board members from Stanley raised his hand and said, "What if we just bought you?" And I said, "No, that's not going to happen. It'd be way too expensive. You'd never get it by finance and we're not ready yet. We still have a lot of journey we want to do." And they said, "Yeah, well, let's tell you about our vision." And they did. And it was basically the same vision we had at MSUITE, just bigger and a lot more opportunity-- so went back to the board and said, "Let's do it."

Well, what we started with at MSUITE really was around BIM, fab, and field workflows, automation in Revit, automation in AutoCAD, [INAUDIBLE], some automation there, more in Revit, taking that information from the model straight to the shop floor where we're providing work instructions to the shop, where they can see what they need to build, when they need to build it, and nothing else. So there's not a lot of distraction and confusion for them. It's exactly what they need. And then we take that into the field.

So from soup to nuts, from the conception of what we're building to fully installed onsite, we're able to track what happened, when it happened, that it happened, and get your accurate percent completes, your productivity metrics so you can do your costing around it, all of that.

So because of all this I've been very fortunate to be in hundreds of fabrication facilities around the United States and Canada and I've learned a lot of stuff around the process of prefabrication. Does anyone not know what prefabrication is? Feel free raise your hand. It's fine. No? Great. Perfect.

So what I learned was prefabs really simple. When you really boil it down to what we're all trying to do, it's bring in materials-- could be onsite or offsite-- bring in materials, prep them, which oftentimes means you're cutting them, assemble them together, and ship them out. That's it. That's really all it comes down to. It gets a lot more complex when you start combining multiple materials, multiple trades, and so on.

So-- but when I really want to take a step back is if we can all agree on that's what it is. You can take a step forward with how do we leapfrog the efforts we've all tried to do. We all try with a manual bandsaw to cut whatever we do, or a chop saw, or porter ban. And then it's, OK, well, let's buy an automated machine, and then it's, and then it's, and then it's.

So how do we leapfrog some of those things? Well, I saw this one on LinkedIn a long time ago and I said I've got to put that in a slide. It all starts with a design. That's why we're here at AU. If you don't get the design right, and sometimes even when you do, it won't get fabricated right and it won't get installed right.

So even if you built the perfect design, and fabricated it perfectly, if your field guys want to change it, it's not going to work. If your fab guys don't like what they saw in design and they change it, it's not going to work. If your BIM guys don't know what they're designing for fabrication and installation, it's not going to work. So it all starts here and goes downstream. Because if you get this right, you've got a fair shot. Does everybody agree with that? Disagree?

By the way, feel free to chime in at any point. There's a small room here. Most of you already know each other, looking around the room. So feel free to chime in and ask questions. Tell me I'm full of it. But let's have a little bit of open forum here.

So this is where I want to really start the conversation about what's next. So today's current ecosystem-- this is a McKinsey image, I'm sure many of you have seen this. But I think it's really interesting because even in its structure here on the slide, you can see how siloed it is.

BIM people do BIM things. Wholesalers do wholesaler things. Installers do installer things. And none of them work together. I'm going to create a bill of materials, and I'm to send it to you, and you're going to give me what I asked for. Well, what if that bill of materials that you create-- 75% of its on backorder? Would you have changed that had you known that? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

So this really siloed system is now changing. And I think a lot of you, especially on the mechanical and plumbing side, will start to see our manufacturers doing things, like [? Vitalik ?] starts to prefabricate. Ferguson is doing BIM work as a wholesaler. You're starting to see a more integrated workflow and that creates a lot of challenges but also a lot of opportunities.

So if you see here on the slide, you have on the far left the development and procurement of the project. What does that mean? That's our bidding, estimating, all the precon. That's engineering, that's architects, that's the whole upstream side of this. And you're starting to see a lot of companies who have tried it and failed-- Katara. Modular builders, a lot of those guys are trying it right now. But it doesn't have to be that complex either. It can be as simple as working in a design build environment or design assist environment.

So the one thing I want to get out of this-- or I want you to get out of this is that throughout this process, there are varying degrees of complexity. You can go from fully modular, fully integrated solutions to we just standardized on this widget and it saved us a giant percentage of labor hours, or complexity, or effort, or confusion, or rework. Right it's important to look at what you guys do in a way that it doesn't have to be perfect. And we'll talk about that a little bit later.

But what's happening with this ecosystem change is that things are moving offsite. McKinsey said that by 2035, which sounds like a long time from now, but it's only 13 years-- that 20% to 30% of the global supply chain value-- so if you know construction, it's around $11 trillion a year and growing about 4% per year. So 20% to 30% of that dollar number is moving offsite. That's huge, huge, huge. And right now we're less than 1%.

So in less than 15 years all of this-- or not all-- but a vast majority of the value proposition of construction is moving offsite. And how does that affect what we do every day? Well, we have to change a lot of what we do in good ways too. It's really important to know that this isn't removing labor, this isn't making things more complex. The whole goal is to make this less complex and easier for us to repeat but yet still build the beautiful things that we're being asked to build every day.

So how do we do it? We're going to talk a little bit about tech for today and tomorrow, but I want to start out with just what we do today. Material movement solutions. Does anybody have one of these in their shop? Nobody? Yeah, most everyone's got the top right one. That's a little spinner for grooving machines, allows you to spin a piece of pipe around or steal.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] forklift.

BRITTON LANGDON: Well, I purposely didn't put the forklift on there. But, yes, you have conveyor systems like-- this is the next step. If you completely remove forklift from your shops, which you should, they're unsafe and very unproductive. But the next step is getting to conveyors. And conveyors work in some ways but they're really static. It's really hard to use a conveyor if you don't have the exact same process over, and over, and over again, which brings us to the next side.

So you see companies like Amazon, and I saw Ferguson as is doing stuff like this, where they're looking at how do we move materials around our facility. Well, the first thing this requires is a facility that doesn't move around a bunch. You're not changing your location of stations every day. You're setting up to do something repeatable. And even if it's not the same thing you're building every day-- if we go back to this-- if you just standardize that this is your process, then you can standardize where things lay out in your facility. And if you standardize that, and sometimes even not necessarily required, you have the opportunity to bring in robotic movement to move your materials around.

So I can tell you, as a part of our acquisition, I've had the opportunity to go back to DeWalt and really tour all the Stanley Black & Decker company. And one of the interesting things I found is there's a-- is anybody F1 fans or racing fans?

A company called Haas, Haas Automation, they're doing some amazing things in manufacturing. They don't do anything with construction.

Vista, a big storage solution that Stanley Black & Decker owns, beautiful storage. They can could-- in theory, you could take small bore copper fittings, store them in the vista machine and it will deliver them to you when you need them. But there's nothing built to do that. They do it in manufacturing every day, but we don't do it at all.

And so we're looking at this as an opportunity to say, "OK, well, what exists that isn't always necessarily repeatable but could be used in construction. And obviously our things get more complex because they're not this big. We've got a lot of sizeable items we're trying to move around facilities, whether that's a two by four in a framing shop or a piece of pipe that's 20 feet long and eight-inch in diameter. Those aren't simple things to store in a conveyor or in a bucket.

So we're looking at ways to make getting the material where it needs to be, when it needs to be there easier, safer, and without less effort-- or with a lot less effort on our customer's parts. So what does this look like in practice? Has anybody ever seen-- this a old video.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK] In this episode, we take a look at how Amazon--

BRITTON LANGDON: We won't play all of it.

- --200,000.

BRITTON LANGDON: I kind of want you guys to see the first few minutes-- few seconds.

- Alongside hundreds of thousands of human workers. This robot army has helped the company fulfill its ever-increasing promises of speedy deliveries to Amazon Prime customers. But it also gave Amazon the technical foundation on which it could build new versions of warehouse robotics for years to come, setting the stage for a potential future where the only people inside Amazon facilities are those employed to maintain and operate their robotic replacements.

You're watching Futurelicious. We'll bring you the latest information on technology. If you enjoyed this video, consider supporting us by subscribing and liking the video.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Much of the boom in warehouse robotics has its roots in Amazon's $775 million.

[END PLAYBACK]

BRITTON LANGDON: There we go. Now we're here. Oh of course. So those little robots there, what's interesting to me about this is that we all order from Amazon. We don't order the same stuff, right? We're all ordering different stuff every day. Yet somehow, they're able to in a giant warehouse move massive quantities of materials in ways that are hyper-efficient and don't require a lot of effort. Yeah, so this is just going to spin. But this is exactly what I wanted to show you anyways.

And all they are is these little robotic pods that slide under a palette, slide under a basket, slide under a crate and move that thing to where it needs to go. So in a pipe shop for example, if I know that what's coming up to be fabricated is a bunch of four inch 90 degree elbows on pieces of pipe or flange or whatever it needs to be welded together, one of those could be delivering them to the assembly sites when they need to get there, right?

As the pipe moves down through the cut stations and gets cut, it knows what piece it belongs to. So why couldn't those come together right when they need to at the next station? And that's where we get into some of more of the automation. Being able to move material in the right spot allows you to be able to prep that material when you need it. So from here this is stuff that already exists. This is Tiger Stop this is razor gauge and Kentucky gauge.

These are things that can take information straight from the model all the way to these machines without ever anybody being involved except for actually improving the work and scheduling the work, things like that. But they can go right to the machine and tell the machine exactly how long to cut it to. These are called positions or pushers. But then you have the ability to go forward one step and say, OK, why not cut the thing too while we're there?

But this adds a layer of complexity, right? If I all of a sudden have the ability to cut 500 pieces an hour, well, I either need somebody to handle those 500 pieces an hour, which is hard to do. Or I need to have some way of sorting those or not cutting 500 pieces an hour. But that defeats the purpose of the automation. So what we talk to a lot of contractors that say, well, those machines are great. But I don't have a guy to stand there and sort 300 pieces when I only need 20 of them. It's true.

So how do we get it to a point where once they're cut, they go to the right spots without us having to sort them? Because in systems like ours and others, we already know where that piece belongs. We know where it's going to next we know what other pieces come with it to be assembled. Why don't we do that for you, right? How do we get there? And the answer to that is with your help, a lot of working with you and trying to figure out these solutions.

One of the ones I find interesting is the one in the middle that's called Cobots. Has anybody heard of Cobots? Yeah, there you go, one. So Cobots is a really cool cutting automation solution that's coming to the drywall market. And their long term vision is for in particular, retrofit, but really almost anything is the ability to go in, have an app, take a picture of a wall opening. It could be a castle cut over a doorway. It can be anything.

But take a picture of a wall opening it will measure that out and automate the cutting process right there on the jobsite. So is that prefabrication? Is that on-site? What does that look like? And so it's starting to blend the worlds a little bit there. But that's a really cool technology that's coming out the T drill machine on the bottom right, that will pull a piece of copper, cut it, label it, and sort it about 600 pieces per hour. Top right is Razor Gage, bottom left is Tiger Stop.

The key point of this, though, is you've got to have them all connected together so that the next stage that comes, you're an assembly station. This is traditional assembly stuff. You've got a Greenlee vendor up top, you've got a, oh, I don't know which manufacturer it is, but you've got a [? pike ?] position on the bottom right. You've got some jigs on the bottom left for carrier fabrication on the plumbing side. And on the top, you have a framing assembly system that can be used for somewhat automation.

And this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. We're taking these iterative approaches, which is really good. But we have the opportunity to leapfrog those going forward. And this picture scares everybody every time I show this, right? But the reality is, these already exist. We have companies like Novarc and Rotoweld and I mean, FANUC and many others. Lincoln Welding is doing this in a lot of cases in a lot of markets.

But what this means is in the Novarc example, Novarc is a pipe welding machine that is semi-automated. So somebody's still there to tell the machine where to go. It can work on three different stations at once, tell them what weld procedures to use, things like that so they control the quality, but allows them to take this robotic environment. And the thing that people say about Novarc they love the best is the pipe's over there. I'm standing here. I'm nowhere near the heat.

I don't have to look at the arc. I don't have to stand bent over it all day long. It makes my life as an employee of that company much, much better. Still the same person, still the same effort, a lot more productivity and a lot more enjoyable workplace for that person. So where MSUITE comes in and where really construction technology comes in for us, you can have a beautifully built body of a shop, right? You can have all the machines in the world and all the automation in the world at each individual station.

But if you don't have a brain to operate it, you lose those synapses firing throughout the whole system, right? And what that looks like is, hang on, is this. You have the user at the very basic level, right? They're the ones actually doing everything. You have the application that sits between them and the user. You have the operating system that watches over all of it. And you have the hardware that they're interacting with.

So MSUITE on the left allows for working straight from the model all the way to the machine that becomes that user interaction as well as the operating system on the back end. So when you have a software that gives them the work instructions at the station when they need them and also is recording everything that happened on the back end, you're able to kind of have the best of both worlds in one spot. And what does that mean?

Well, the impact of prefabrication has been studied over and over and over. And most of you are doing it. I hope all of you know why. But in case you don't have that answer a lot, we get asked all the time why do people prefab? I got to pay the same wage rate that I do in the field. I'm sure all of you have heard that. It's the same person. Yeah, I got machines, but those machines are expensive. I got to pay for the roof over their head, too. I don't know. I just don't know if it makes sense, right?

It's been proven over and over and over again that you're massively reducing the amount of waste that you have on a jobsite. So we have contractors that will just do unboxing of things like toilets and laboratories and things like that. They literally just unbox them, get the trash out of the way in the shop, put it in the dumpster behind, ship them out on a cart. And then no one's having to do that on the job site. You're not getting cleaning fees or penalties on the job site. You're getting rid of a lot of the actual trash waste.

But on top of that, you also get rid of material waste from a rework perspective. So when things are done right in the design side, they're fabricated right in the field or in the shop, they're taking to the field, and you're not having to cut them apart. You're not having a lot of that scrap that you would normally see when you're cutting pieces in the field. All of that is kept in the shop and reduced massively by things like nesting and optimization.

Your labor cost goes way down. Why is that? I got to pay the guys same amount. Because the amount that person is able to do in the shop versus what they're able to do in the field is exponentially more. Now, we're seeing anywhere between 30% to 50% increase in everyday direct labor just by doing it in a shop over the field. I know a lot of you guys kind of already probably know this, but I think it's important to keep reinforcing that message.

Because as we get better and as we get more sophisticated, it gets more expensive. And people want to know wait a minute. You're asking me to buy a half a million dollar cut table. Why? We can do this in the field with a band saw, our Porter band, excuse me. The quality of the work installed, one of the things that we see a lot of is that because there is that process, because there's that defined set of steps that things go through, a lot of people are adding a quality control step to that and multiple steps sometimes throughout that process.

So they're able to see once things are fabricated, if it met the design, if it's going to fit once it gets to the field, if it was welded correctly or assembled correctly, if it was cut to the right length, there's all sorts of QC that you're now afforded to do because it's sitting right here in a controlled environment. You can literally walk by it and check it, right? Whereas on the job site, you got to walk around and find stuff. You've got to not be in someone's way. You got to make sure it's in the right spot.

There's all sorts of things that can go wrong when you try and do that on the job site. So it becomes less and less frequent from a quality control perspective. As long as it holds water or as long as it's held up tight as long as it passed the right test, we're good. But that extra layer of QA QC very rarely happens. Worker safety, this one I mean, this one's obvious, less congestion. You're standing at a workstation or walking around maybe a couple of feet in the shop. This is another reason why you get rid of forklifts.

There's the ability to wear safety glasses. You don't a lot of things overhead usually in a shop so you don't have to wear a hardhat most of the time. There's just a lot less chaos and complexity in a controlled environment. That's why it's called that, and so worker safety goes way up. And the last three, site logistics, extras and purchasing, and then schedule performance, they all play into that from the same reasons that the previous four that I listed.

So where do you start? So I'd actually like to ask a few of you. One of the things I think that we all struggle with is convincing people that a change is going to be worth it, right? It's very difficult to tell somebody, hey we're to make this change. And I think it's going to be good. And everyone else says it's good too, by the way. And there's all these stats that we have in the industry. But still, there's that one last leap you have to get over that's really, really hard unless you have a solid metric internally.

Hey, we tried it on this job. It went really well, and here's the three reasons why. Let's try those same three reasons over again and see if it works out again. But what I always like to say is it's important to have a diversity of thought in these meetings, in these strategy conversations. If you can get to a point where you're arguing and debating in a meeting, as long as it's respectful and that people are going to walk out and stack hands and have a direction once they leave that meeting, it's really, really valuable.

Because if we're all talking about the same things, we all have the same sort of echoes in our chamber, we don't have any diversity of thought. We have a lot of risk. We have a lot of opportunity to miss things. And I think the very first thing that starts with where to start is to think differently. The next thing I like to say is one thing we don't do as an industry. How many of you guys and ladies have a budget in your company right now for research and development?

That is three times more than it was five years ago. And by the way, that was only maybe 10% of the room 15% of the room. So why is that? I think it's because the very first thing you have to do is explain to your owner that they're going to make less money this year. I'm sorry. And then you have to say but next year, next year is going to be better, right? How easy is that to sell?

But it's true, proven over and over and over again. If you take 10% of your revenue and by the way, in construction today, the most investment that we see typically from an R&D perspective, and I'm not just talking on technology, I'm talking about on processes. How do we get better? Do we have a process improvement team at our company, right? It's 2%. Technology is less than one. The technology is broad, too. That's not MSUITE It's not just one thing. Technology is a very broad category, and it's less than 1%.

If we can convince our ownership to take 10% of our revenue and commit it to R&D, excuse me, 10% of profit committed to R&D, you can, and it's been shown you can dramatically increase and by a factor of 10 10, excuse me, 10%, your profit over a period of time as long as that investment is continued, and as long as that investment is compounded what does that mean? So it means that how do you get to a point where we made a good decision. We tried something. It worked, and you don't just stop.

That's the biggest thing we see. Hey, we did it, and it worked. Let's do that again. But what about the next? Thing how do we standardize that and then go forward to the next thing where all right, well we've componentized on this thing. What if we componentize on this thing, too? And it can be super small and simple but can have a massive impact on what you do and then taking that good information, taking that success and bringing it back to the rest of the team.

One of the things we don't do very well in our industry, in this industry is celebrate. But we can go to the bar, for sure. But internally at our organizations, we don't like to brag. And that's good, but at the same time, you're not getting any better. It's the difference between bragging and celebrating a victory. And I think if you're able to say internally, hey guys, this is what we did. It worked for us here's the steps we took. Give it a shot. Let's see if it works for you. I'm here to help you.

And that's where that investment in R&D takes place because if we're all working on projects all the time, and we're our own little profit centers in the company, it's very difficult to step outside of the business and look at what we do from a global perspective to say, OK, we've got 17 different projects going on. And all 17 are being run in different ways with different strategies with different approaches. How do we start to standardize on what we do from a best practices perspective? And how do we invest in those things and take chances and expect to fail but fail forward, fail fast and fail forward.

So what does that mean? I had a long time ago, and everyone's heard this long time ago, one of my coaches told me Britton, there's no stupid questions, just stupid people. And I always kind of was like as he called me stupid? I don't know. I'm not quite sure what that means. But what I've learned over time is yeah, he's right. There are no stupid questions. There are only stupid people. And the only stupid people I've ever met are people that don't ask questions.

So I think it's really important to ask the silly questions. When we train new people at MSUITE, one of the first things we do is we go to a fab shop and everyone's terrified first time they go to a fab shop, a lot of moving things going on, a lot of angry people in the shop. It's just like I don't know. I'm not in construction. I don't know what's going on. The first thing I say is go ask him what he's doing. And they're like, it's got a hood down, no, no thanks. I'm not doing that.

Just give it a shot. Ask him what he's doing. Ask him how he's doing. And guess what? Nine times out of 10 guy lifts his hood, and goes I'm welding. OK, well, what are you welding? Well, I'm welding this. Yeah but I don't know anything about this. Could you tell me what that is? It's a MIG welder. What's a MIG welder? They start talking about it. Because guess what? People like to talk about what they do, right? It's fun.

You don't want to sit there with your hood down all day and then just walk home at night or go home at night and get back up and do it again the next day. They talk about what you do like to celebrate what you do in certain ways. So how do you ask questions the right way? Don't act like an a-hole, that's all it is, right? Just say, hey, I don't know what I'm talking about. Can you help me out? And what that leads to is some standardization. Why do you do it that way?

I don't know. It's always the way I've done it. Is there any other way to do it? Well yeah, I've tried this, that, and the other. But no one seems to care. OK, well, what's the easiest thing you think you could change right now to make it better? And there's always an answer, always. I've never heard anyone not have an answer. What's one thing in your day-to-day life that you could change in one small way that would make your life easier?

And sometimes, you don't think it's possible. Of course you don't think it's possible. Because if you did, would you would just do it, right? But a lot of times, people don't realize the simplest thing to do is standardize the simplest thing in front of you. How do we do the same thing every day? How do we make that thing repeatable so that the next person we come in and train doesn't have to figure it out? They just know because you said, hey, this is how we do it.

And where does that go to? Is it really difficult to look at slide? But it's called the OODA loop. Anybody familiar with this? If I can leave you with one thing coming out of construction for me and going into software world was a big change. And one of the things I learned from really, really smart software people was this concept of Scrum, agile. People take it pretty far. It's kind of a religion cult sometimes.

But at the same time, there's some really good basic principles around it. And it's kind of what I've been talking about this whole time and that is this OODA loop comes from the Air Force. This was Air Force pilots come up with in the Vietnam War, I believe. But it's about how do you make, in their case, how do you make really life or death decisions very fast and learn from them and not die doing it?

And so they have this concept of OODA observation, observe your environment. Where am I? What am I doing? And when you think about this from an Air Force pilot sitting in the cockpit, it's really easy. What's around me? Where is the enemy? What altitude am I at? What speed am I at? Where are the dangers? And then orient yourself. At 12,000, feet I got mountains on the right. I got enemy on the left. I'm good. Make a decision, right? The next thing is what are you going to do?

Where do you go and go right then? And the very next one is probably the most important one that no one really thinks about. It's the action part. It's analyzing it. How do you go and say, OK, this is the action I took. Was it right, or was it wrong? And where are we right back to the beginning? And they do that over and over and over and over and over as they're flying at thousands of miles per hour in combat.

How do you translate that to business? It's really simple. It's at the very top. Guess, test and revise. Where are we as an estimating department? Where are we as a fab shop? What's the environment that we're in? Literally. We're in a 10,000 square foot space. We have three machines. Perfect, what do those machines do? And then orient yourself to the challenge in front of you. We have 2,000 hours worth of work coming through we got to get done by the end of the week. We have five people.

How are we going to do that? Probably not. How do you take a bite out of it? How do you extend your schedule? Do you have other people that can help you? Orient and then make a decision. This is what we're going to do. This is how we're going to do it. Everybody on board stack hands and do it. Then measure was that successful? Was that a good decision or bad decision? And don't take offense if it was a bad decision. Make the change and move forward.

So the OODA loop is something that we brought into our company from a software perspective, very Scrum, very agile. And the last thing I want to say about this is one of the pieces of agile is the actual name, agility. Be agile. If this doesn't work for you, tweak it, right? Find a way that does.

But I can tell you above and beyond anything else, if you guys are aware of your surroundings as a business, if you're able to orient that business in a direction that we can all stack hands on, if you make a decision of the best path forward. And act on it measure the success of that decision, and observe where you're at again, you will evolve very, very fast.

So how do you analyze those results? You have to do it objectively. One of the biggest things I've always struggled with in our organizations we work with, and it's probably one of my favorite things is as well. It's passion, right? There are many passionate people in this industry. You all are among them. You wouldn't be here if you weren't unless you just like New Orleans. So it's really important to look at what you do objectively and make sure that data is correct.

That's one of the things that we see very often is that I've always heard there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. You can make data look and generate results however you want. And I think it's really important to try and do it in an objective way that helps you as a group and ultimately the company move forward. And one of the biggest challenges we have is that it's very difficult for groups to standardize on what good looks like. All right, so what are your stupid questions?